A calm sentence like a story. I used to know a man who had a dog and I followed their steps in the snow, I got into the habit of walking just as far as they did every day. At the same time I also knew a woman whose husband had seven guns. I used to know a woman who’s the woman who married Neil Simon. I like the woman who used to work in the Lenox market, she never wears boots, then she retired. In New England the women are often more exciting than the men, Lewis thinks so too, I don’t know why. There’s a tribe somewhere where people say about the men, look how he’s changed since he’s had children, he looks awful !
Citations
I ask are you finished, you seem to want mine. There’s only time left to tell how the floors met the walls and we saw centipedes all the time crawling across the carpets which were green beneath the blue glass table which was a mirror with a plate of balls on it under the windows which on some days we cleaned but not too well so we wouldn’t fall out like my mother did not but someone else’s mother did and she died but my sister fell out once with a piece of cheese in her hand but she was so embarrassed and ashamed she didn’t tell anyone and just got up after I had already tried to compare with her how sex for us might be different but then we got into trouble again and resorted to the cellar to tear each other’s hair out and teach tongue-kissing.
The sauce is done. Then I went to visit a girlfriend of mine who was going to a Jesuit college in Syracuse. When I came home Bob met me at the airport, it was the first time I’d flown and I had fallen in love with someone and that was Ed. We went back to my house in Ridgewood, this was when I was trying to go to Barnard but it took me two hours to get there. Bob’s mother had given me a wedding shower because my grandfather had given me my mother’s diamond ring and she took that to mean we were engaged since she was worried anyway I’d get pregnant before we got married, though she was relieved that Bob wasn’t queer after all. I didn’t know anything about birth control. We had set a date for the wedding and arranged a reception but the place we were going to have it in burned down. Bob’s mother worked as a maker of wedding gowns. So that night in my house I told Bob to watch me sleep because I was afraid to sleep otherwise. In the middle of the night I sat up in bed, he said, and asked him a question. After that he always understood that I was no longer in love with him. I didn’t know what Ed wanted to do but a couple of days later he came to my house and said I want to live with you, meet me in two weeks. The night before I was supposed to leave I went out with Grace who a while before had been in such a bad car accident she was still walking with a cane. We went to a bar and I left with a minor league baseball player who had an MG, Grace left with somebody else and we met later at my house. I missed the taxi I had called to make the early plane but I caught a later one and when Grace woke up in my house all alone my grandfather mistook her for me even though she has red hair and he called her Bernie. When Grace left my neighbor Tex told her he’d seen the taxi and wondered what was going on, he’s the one who had said when my father died, “Who’s that?”
Cette autre parole, qui se détourne avec insolence du contenu de la culture, n’en utilise pas moins les mots et la syntaxe du discours culturel. Comment pourrait-il en être autrement ? Et, du même coup, comment peut-elle échapper à son orbite ? Par ce procédé très simple et très redoutable, bien connu des poètes et des astronautes, qui consiste tout bonnement à la prendre de vitesse.
You look like an occasionally violent man
not in charge of an altar
not in charge of an important altar, anyway
not one that is about fancy deities
just a plain neighborhood for the dead
not in charge of an altar
not in charge of an important altar, anyway
not one that is about fancy deities
just a plain neighborhood for the dead
please give me
spare change and your word that I won’t be missing in a year
– as is the custom, two humans make a humanity
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« But Rooftops Did All the Work »
Heaven is all goodbyes
, , ,
p. 114–115
My dear, if it is not a city, it is a prison.
If it has a prison, it is a prison. Not a city.
1. Notes Toward a Theory of the Crush, Crush’s Discourse, Ma Vie en Crush.
2. Tableau vivant of extant crushes with possibility of sexual consummation determining centrality.
3. Tableau vivant of former crushes, all asleep on the floor.
4. Hidden track of embarassing crushes on an otherwise unlistenable album.
5. Regarding the crush of never-to-be-lovers, these subcategories : the never-to-be-lovers of who is already spoken for ; the never-to-be-lovers of geographical impossibility ; the never-to-be-lovers of sexual incompatibility ; the never-to-be-lovers of the narcissism of small differences ; the never-to-be-lovers of asymmetrical desire.
6. Some species of crushes : the crush of intersecting research interests, the crush of good politics, the crush of great poems, the crush of proximity, the crush of lack of proximity, the crush on who you’ve never met, the crush on whoever sits next to you and begins to talk, the crush on the highly informed gossip, the crush on who leads with cruelty and ends with affection, the crush on who leads with affection and ends with cruelty, the crush on whoever you are content to observe, the crush on who you think could use a little more education, the crush on a fighting spirit.
7. And what are the territories beyond the territory of the crush ? Romantic love ? Sex ? Friendship ? Apathy ? Literary journals ? Unsent emails ? Armed cells ?
the stupid logic of dinner
We were not innocent. Our education was authored by our senses. Our lambness was written into our bodies with the violence of the world as it is, yet our interest in understanding the lamb’s education, in the lamb’s way of knowing, began to take the form of the bird of prey’s pursuit. We were at once formed by grudge and narrowed by desire. In everything we wanted, all we acquired, and in how we could not want, how we could acquire nothing, we were simultaneously lamb and bird of prey.
Our mixed nature was not innocent. No matter how much predator-like acquisition of the predator’s way learning acts upon a lamb-interior, a lamb still appears to all who see it like a lamb. The lamb might be a doubly conscious lamb, but the bird of prey’s stupid logic of dinner remains, for the time being, the logic of the world.
,
« When the lambs rise up »
A handbook of disappointed fate
, , ,
p. 21
History is full of people who just didn’t. They said no thank you, turned away, ran away to the desert, stood on the streets in rags, lived in barrels, burned down their own houses, walked barefoot through town, killed their rapists, pushed away dinner, meditated into the light. Even babies refuse, and the elderly, too. All types of animals refuse : at the zoo they gaze dead-eyed through plexiglass, fling feces at the human faces, stop having babies. Classes refuse. The poor throw their lives onto barricades. Workers slow the line. Enslaved people have always refused, poisoning the feasts, aborting the embryos. And the diligent, flamboyant jaywalkers assert themselves against traffic as the first and foremost visible, daily lesson in just not.
Saying nothing is a preliminary method of no. To practice unspeaking is to practice to being unbending : more so in a crowd. Cicero wrote “cum tacent, clament”—“in silence they clamor”—and he was right : only a loudmouth would mistake silence for agreement. Silence is as often conspiracy as it is consent. A room of otherwise lively people saying nothing, staring at a figure of authority, is silence as the inchoate of a now-initiated we won’t.
Sometimes our refusal is in our staying put. We perfect the loiter before we perfect the hustle. Like every other toddler, each of us once let all adult commotion move around our small bodies as we inspected clover or floor tile. As teens we loitered, too, required “security” to dislodge us, like how once in a country full of freely roaming dogs, I saw the primary occupation of the police was to try to keep the dogs out of the public fountains, and as the cops had moved the dogs from the fountains, a new group of dogs had moved in. This was just like being a teenager at the mall.
There is no superiority in making things or in re-making things. It’s like everything else, old men who go fishing, hair extensions, nail art, individual false eyelashes glued on with semi-permanent glue, sewing clothes and re-sewing clothes, sketching, sketching animals, sketching human faces, sketching flowers, growing flowers, flowers, flowers that might even be marigolds and petunias, perfume that smells like party girls, perfume that smells like dowagers, perfume that does not smell like flowers or more like flowers mixed with the urine of jungle animals and some tobacco smoke, perfume that does not smell like men, one faux-Chanel earring, sunglasses resembling those of RAF leader Ulrike Meinhof, hair pinned up on one side, purses that are not real, pockets on dresses and skirts, dresses and skirts, blouses without buttons, limiting each type of possession to one old suitcase full of that type of possession, track suits with rhinestones, zip up onesie track suits, plump women, fat children, fat dogs, slender men, photos of Angelica Houston, the cracked dirty swimming pools of low-rent apartment complexes, bleach-haired boys smoking dope against the chain-link fence, the workers walking to their strip mall jobs, the strip malls, the dumpsters behind the strip malls, the karaoke nights in the bars in the strip malls, physique training, hypertrophy, very heavy weights, Juicy Stacey, Toy Selectah, every apartment complex having its own ducks, waking each spring morning to those ducks, the stateless state of contract labor, the invisible iv also the invisible catheter, everyone hugging the duct tape replica like starving little rhesus monkeys, everything in the everything like “there is no world but the world!”